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In the seventeenth chapter of John Dickson Carr’s mystery novel “The Three Coffins” (1935), the story pauses so that Dr. Gideon Fell, a brilliant sleuth, can deliver the “Locked-Room Lecture,” an elaboration of all the various methods by which a person might be found murdered in a “hermetically sealed chamber,” a room locked from the inside. It’s one of the most justly celebrated passages in the history of detective fiction, and Carr, engaging the possibilities and limitations of genre as his very subject, breaks the fourth wall with merry aplomb. “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not,” Fell tells his audience. “Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.” A surreal gesture with a rational impulse: that was Carr all over. He was the undisputed master of plotting and solving the impossible crime, the murder as magic trick, in which victims appear to have been killed by supernatural means.

I began reading Carr in my early teens, and I never stopped. Even among the great Golden Age detective novels, his work stands out for its cheeky humor, baroque invention, and macabre spirit. The director and screenwriter Rian Johnson has made no secret of his own fandom—he wrote an introduction for a recent re-release of the author’s novel “The Problem of the Wire Cage” (1939)—and although Agatha Christie is an obvious inspiration for Johnson’s “Knives Out” murder-mystery movies, Carr has always struck me as the more profound, if less acknowledged, influence. (As it happens, Christie and Carr were peers; she claimed he was the only detective novelist who could bamboozle even her.) Imagine my delight when, roughly halfway through “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Johnson laid his Carrs on the table. Confronted with an impossible crime of his own, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the private investigator who anchors the series, launches into a bullet-point summary of Dr. Fell’s famous lecture. Blanc even hauls out a paperback copy of “The Three Coffins,” albeit under its U.K. publication title, “The Hollow Man.”

Of all the details in Johnson’s enjoyably farfetched plot, the widespread availability of a British edition in an American setting is the only one I’d quibble with, but it’s clear why Johnson exercised some titular license: few men are hollower than the film’s designated villain and inevitable murder victim, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who spews a gospel of hatred and fury at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a handsome, underattended Catholic church in the fictional upstate New York town of Chimney Rock. From his pulpit, Wicks rains down selectively vituperative fire and brimstone, with an eye toward provoking walkouts from unsuspecting visitors—say, a gay couple or a single mom. Chief among his targets is his late mother, Grace (Annie Hamilton, seen in lurid flashbacks), a figure whose sexual notoriety has earned her the cruelly redundant nickname the Harlot Whore. When Wicks isn’t lashing out at his congregants, he tries to unite them, with fundamentalist fury, against the looming threat of an increasingly secular America. Donald Trump is never invoked in “Wake Up Dead Man,” but Wicks has undeniably built his own Trumpian cult of personality, and he holds the church’s most loyal parishioners in his sway.

They’re a pretty wretched lot. There’s a local doctor, Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), who has slipped into alcoholic despair since his wife left him, and Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a best-selling author and self-professed recovering liberal, whose rightward drift has led him to write an unreadable book about Wicks’s life. Somewhat more sympathetic are Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a gifted cellist, sidelined by chronic pain, whose generous donations keep the church running, and Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a high-strung attorney. The script’s most cynical creation is Vera’s adoptive son, Cy (Daryl McCormack), a soulless opportunist who, after failing to launch himself into Republican politics, is now aiming for social-media stardom. Wicks’s most devoted ally is Our Lady’s designated church lady, Martha Delacroix (an amusing Glenn Close), who knows where the proverbial bodies are buried. (Speaking of which: just outside the church is an enormous crypt that underscores the film’s Lazarusian title.)

Into this group comes an earnest ray of light: Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a junior priest—“young, dumb, and full of Christ,” in his own words—who has been sent to serve in Wicks’s church. Overflowing with grace and mercy, Jud yearns to embrace his parishioners in their human brokenness, without condemnation. Naturally, the monsignor immediately sees him as a threat and launches a vicious campaign of psychological warfare, repeatedly forcing Jud to hear his confessions—in which Wicks describes his masturbation habits in nauseating detail—and undercutting the younger priest’s authority at every opportunity. Jud, a former boxer with a checkered history, has vowed never (again) to throw a fist in anger, but Wicks’s bullying tactics tempt him to break it. They also make Jud the prime suspect when the monsignor is fatally stabbed in church, right after delivering his Good Friday homily, in an alcove located just out of the congregation’s view. Before long, Blanc arrives on the scene, bent on figuring out how Wicks could have been slain, mid-service, by a murderer who appears to have passed right through the church’s walls. Regrettably, no one terms the incident a Mass murder.

When the first “Knives Out” was released in theatres, in 2019, it felt like a Hollywood revival—and a sophisticated rewiring—of a lost narrative art. Here was an original country-house murder plot, constructed with enormous care and rigorous ingenuity. Johnson sharpened these throwback pleasures by pairing them with razor-sharp progressive politics: the film was a kind of Cinderella story, in which a kind, lowly heroine (Ana de Armas) teamed up with Blanc to solve the crime and ended up triumphing over her racist, classist, obscenely wealthy former employers. Johnson preserved the story’s structure in his next “Knives Out” mystery, “Glass Onion” (2022), again pairing Blanc with an upstanding foil (Janelle Monáe) and launching, this time, an attack on billionaires and tech bros everywhere. Even so, the joke was at least partly on the movie: by then, the growing “Knives Out” franchise had been acquired by Netflix, a move that put Johnson’s disruptor-culture satire in a rather different light. Like most Netflix films, “Glass Onion” received only a token theatrical release and never got the chance to become a major big-screen hit on the order of the first “Knives Out,” which grossed more than three hundred million dollars worldwide. (If the laughter hasn’t died in your throat yet, Netflix now seems poised to acquire Warner Bros., throwing the direction of one of the last major Hollywood studios and its future theatrical releases into doubt.)

“Wake Up Dead Man,” which arrives on Netflix this week, directs its political ire at the unholy alliance of Christianity and the political right; the intolerance, insularity, and rampant misogyny that have taken root in the church; and the terrifying speed with which the disgruntled clergymen of today can become the YouTube demagogues of tomorrow. In dropping this satirical payload, the movie does bear out a structural weakness in the “Knives Out” series: a nagging shortage of individual development among the supporting characters. With one or two exceptions, Wicks’s parishioners feel little more than decorative; there’s no real sense of suspicion mounting and falling on each one of them in turn. Most are snide and strident, petty and self-serving, and their bickersome denunciations turn monotonous in ways that suggest, at times, a less-than-generous deity in the director’s chair.

The characters’ stick-figure proportions feel all the more glaring next to the complexity and generosity of Jud, whose insistence on his innocence is clouded by the shadow of his guilty past. Nonetheless, Blanc, knowing a good man when he sees one, enlists Jud’s help in solving the murder, setting in motion a predictable but enjoyable theological debate. Blanc, a strict skeptic and a gay man, has no use for Catholic dogma, but even an atheist would be moved by Jud’s humility, and by the genuine sweetness and sincerity of O’Connor’s performance. An astoundingly versatile talent (in “La Chimera,” “Challengers,” and this year’s “The Mastermind,” among others), O’Connor nails both Jud’s seriousness of spirit and the tendency toward good-natured, self-consciously vulnerable oversharing that, to judge by the prayer meetings and Bible studies of my own churchgoing youth, every eager young minister must possess. When Jud is interrupted, mid-investigation, by a woman’s heartfelt request for prayer, he treats the plea—and so, to its credit, does the movie—as a chastening reminder of first principles. Whether his name is cleared, Jud resolves, is immaterial. Come what may, he’s here to love and serve God’s people, as humbly and as radically as possible.

It’s no small thing for mainstream entertainment to make space for these contemplative gestures, especially during an action-heavy closing stretch that gets messier and more dementedly hair-raising by turns, unleashing nightmarish rivulets of rain, blood, poison, and acid, and culminating in what I’d call the opposite of an Easter miracle. But Johnson is saved, so to speak, by his refusal of condescension; he’s fastidiously committed to taking seriously the things that many others don’t, whether they be mysteries as a genre or mysteries of faith. For all the film’s wild swings between slapstick and snark, I can’t help but find myself mentally arranging a place for “Wake Up Dead Man” on the same shelf as the writings of G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, both great crime writers and Christian apologists, and of P. D. James, an Anglican for whom the detective story was a powerfully moral exercise—a means of bringing order out of disorder. Carr, for his part, was a Presbyterian-raised agnostic, a hard-headed rationalist whose writing veered, on occasion, into the outright supernatural. He knew, as even Benoit Blanc suspects by the movie’s end, that not every impossibility can be explained. ♦

In January of 2018, Donald Trump hosted a group of lawmakers in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a bipartisan immigration deal. But, when talking about plans to give protected status to immigrants from African countries and other nations, such as El Salvador and Haiti, he grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he demanded, adding that he’d prefer to have more people enter the U.S. from largely white, European nations such as Norway. The remarks, published soon after the meeting in the Washington Post, caused a sensation. Trump denied the reporting, and a couple of the Republican senators who were present said they did not recall him making the comments. “This was not the language used,” Trump tweeted. He called the account “made up by Dems.” When questions about the statements persisted, he told reporters, “I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”

Nearly eight years later, and more than an hour and twenty-five minutes into a speech at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump finally admitted that he had, in fact, used the “shithole” language. He then set off on an extended riff about how the United States takes in too many immigrants from Somalia and other places that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” Trump didn’t just acknowledge what he once denied; as the audience applauded, he lingered on his past remark as a fond memory.

For many, it was a gotcha moment—the President taking ownership, belatedly, for one of his most iconic lines. “The truth comes out,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, whose account of the meeting had been questioned by his G.O.P. colleagues, posted on social media. Others focussed less on the revelation that our chronically untruthful leader had failed to tell the truth about something, and more on the escalating hate speech about Somali immigrants in Minnesota that the President is now spewing forth on a regular basis. It was both of those things, of course, and also a perfect example of the contrast between Trump’s two terms. Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said “shithole countries” to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.

Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past, and that, we must now understand, includes Trump 1.0. For years, he has complained that pretty much all of his predecessors in the White House were wrong about everything. The surprise of his second term, to the extent that there is one, is that Trump’s critique of America’s other Presidents is no longer just a repudiation of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; it now extends to Trump himself. Not to him personally, of course. Anyone who has watched even a minute of a Trump Cabinet meeting knows that our President is never wrong about anything. But if Trump is unwilling to admit any errors of his own, he is more than happy to reject the policies of those who worked for him, even when it’s his big, bold signature scribbled with his trademark black Sharpie on the cover.

Eight years ago this month, Trump’s White House published its first national-security strategy, a document that extolled NATO’s enduring value as “one of our great advantages over our competitors,” and praised America’s allies as, in the words of one of the strategy’s principal authors, the then national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, “the best defense against today’s threats.” Its most famous passage declared a new era of “great power competition” and warned that China and Russia posed grave long-term dangers to the United States. I cannot count the number of times I had this document quoted to me by Republican establishment types eager to prove that Trump really was a Reagan-esque tough-on-Russia guy, after all.

His new national-security doctrine, released late last week, has abandoned the language about great-power threats from China and Russia in favor of a reduced role for America as the unchallenged hegemon of the Western hemisphere. To the extent that a global theory of the case is expressed, it is a Darwinian vision of geopolitical might makes right: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” the document stresses, “is a timeless truth of international relations.” The thirty-three-page paean to the leadership of “The President of Peace” also calls for an end to NATO expansion, treats Russia as an equal to Europe (without mentioning its responsibility for launching a war of aggression against Ukraine), and essentially promotes regime change—for America’s European allies. (In the language of the strategy: “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”) The plan, not surprisingly, was well received by the Kremlin, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised the adjustments to U.S. strategy as “largely consistent with our vision.”

However much Trump was personally involved in shaping these national-security documents, there’s little doubt that the 2025 version sounds a lot more like the man himself than the 2017 iteration. Back then, Trump’s real views about the world—a profoundly disruptive departure from decades of Republican foreign policy—were, like his “shithole countries” comment, still meant only for private consumption. Now he’s loud and proud about them.

The most important point here is that Trump’s second term—the “Do-Over Presidency,” I called it a few months ago—is an exercise in Presidential wish fulfillment. This time, he is not about to let persnickety lawyers, or his own past record, stand in the way. Think of the long list of extreme policies that Trump talked about in his first term but has only followed through on in this one: ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, imposing sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners by declaring a national “emergency,” sending troops into Democratic-run cities to quell domestic political protests.

All three of these policies, it should be noted, are currently subject to lawsuits in the federal courts—a major reason that Trump’s first-term advisers warned him against pursuing them. But he did not get rid of the policies; he ditched the advisers. Unconstrained and emboldened, today’s Trump has learned from years of experience how to make the machinery of Washington give him what he wants, whether it is legal or not. He is, at last, the “Jurassic Park” velociraptor that figures out how to open the door, in the memorable image once evoked for me by a national-security official from Trump’s first term.

Some of the difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0, as in the rally the other night, is in the presentation. While he’s always been lewd and rude, a liar and an extemporizer whose public shows are designed to shock and entertain, his tongue has clearly been loosened by advancing age and the adoring bubble of sycophants in which he now exists. Having dispensed entirely with the dreary rituals of acting Presidential, Trump now talks in public the way he does in private—swearing, rambling, sexist, racist. It wasn’t just the rant about Somali immigrants, or the extreme length of his speech. ( Ninety-seven minutes, compared with an average of forty-five minutes at rallies in 2016.) Or the cringe-y digression about“that beautiful face and the lips that don’t stop, pop, pop, pop, like a machine gun” of his young female press secretary. And the cursing—where to begin? There’s just so much of it. Is that because he’s eight years older and no longer bound by his old inhibitions? Or maybe he’s just really angry that his poll numbers have sunk so low?

If that’s the case, we can expect a whole lot more expletives, because Trump, untethered, is now by many measures more unpopular than ever before. In his first term, the President was already a polarizing and historically unpopular figure, but he had a strong economy going for him—even if it was never “the greatest economy in the history of the world” that he so often proclaimed it to be. This time, with persistent inflation, fears of impending recession, and global jitters about his preference for market-crushing tariffs, support for Trump’s economic policies has fallen even lower than backing for the man himself. On Thursday, the Associated Press and NORC released a new survey showing him with his worst numbers of the year—with just thirty-six per cent approving of his job performance and thirty-one per cent supporting what he’s done for the economy, his lowest showing in either of his two terms. Gallup, in a similar recent survey, found that sixty per cent of Americans now disapprove of his second-term job performance. The electorate, it turns out, has a few choice words for Trump, too. ♦

The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz is joined by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who teach at Harvard, and Lucan A. Way, who teaches at the University of Toronto, for an installment of “How Bad Is It?,” a monthly series on the health of American democracy. In a new essay for the journal Foreign Affairs, “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” the scholars of government assert that President Trump’s rapid consolidation of power in the first year of his second term has tipped the United States into authoritarianism—specifically, into competitive authoritarianism, in which elections persist but the ruling party rigs the system in its favor. The panel discuss how they arrived at their conclusions and suggest that not all is lost: America’s authoritarian moment could be temporary. “The United States is in a very good place to resist,” Levitsky says. “Civil society is very robust and so there is a very high likelihood that Trump will fail.”

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We all know the formula: it begins with a dead body, and quickly introduces a motley crew of outlandish characters, each with a motive for murder. The whodunnit genre has been a cultural fixture since the days of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie—the latter of whom has been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Recently, though, the murder mystery has achieved a new level of saturation, with streaming services offering up a seemingly endless supply of glossy thrillers. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how these new entries are updating the classic form. “Wake Up Dead Man,” the latest of Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” movies, slyly incorporates social commentary, while shows like “Search Party” and “Only Murders in the Building” poke fun at the figure of the citizen sleuth. In our era of conspiracy theories and vigilante actors, there’s also a dark side to the archetype. “This desire to be the hero and to follow the logical trails and take things into your own hands—it's very appealing, if you do it right,” Schwartz says. “It’s great if you catch the right guy. If you don’t, and you catch the wrong one, the entire foundation of society crumbles.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Knives Out” (2019)
“Glass Onion” (2022)
“Wake Up Dead Man” (2025)
“Big Little Lies” (2017-)
“The White Lotus” (2021-)
“And Then There Were None,” by Agatha Christie
“Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age,” by Anna Russell (The New Yorker)
“The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side: A Miss Marple Mystery,” by Agatha Christie
“Only Murders in the Building” (2021-)
“Nicole Kidman Gives Us What We Want in the Silly, Soapy ‘Perfect Couple,’ ” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Residence” (2025)
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” by Arthur Conan Doyle
“Search Party” (2016-22)
“The Hound of the Baskervilles,” by Arthur Conan Doyle
The “Encyclopedia Brown” books
“Clue” (1985)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.